Archive

Yes that’s right, this blog has moved location. It’s become so popular and so awesome that we had to put it somewhere else and not on the basic WordPress.com hosting. There’s many reasons for doing this, mainly to make it even better!

Just like the hundred minions carrying the house in this picture, I’ve worked hard at moving all the useful articles across that I and many others have written over the last 4 years (Wow! Has it really been that long?).

The new blog will continue to have useful posts for all PBEM and play-by-post roleplayers.

Why did we move?

To make the blog better. The free account we had (this one you’re looking at right now) only allows us to choose from a few templates, and I have niggles with the presentations of each of them. Like the way the headings don’t quite have enough spacing, and the colours are all drab and dull. Moving to a proper hosted WordPress means I can choose from a million other templates, and make changes that will make it match the OngoingWorlds website so there’s no confusion when you go from there to the blog and go “what the hell is this? It looks all different!”.

Also there’s more options for allowing other users to post to the blog. I’ve had some amazing people contribute articles to the blog, but unless they go through the complicated process of getting a WordPress.com account, the article looks like it was posted by me, and they don’t get the credit they deserve.

Last week I added a new feature to OngoingWorlds which allows long-running games to show an summary of the recent story. This is to communicate recent events to a new member without amending your game description.

Half of the battle of keeping a successful play-by-post game going for a long time is communicating with other members, and many people have told me that it’s the community around a game that keeps them interested. Read more…

Some updates to a website take a long time and a lot of effort, but there’s not always something obvious when it’s done. This is one of those changes that’s taken a long time, and the advantage isn’t totally obvious straight away. I’ll start by explaining the problem.

Characters can be organised into groups

OngoingWorlds allows you to list all characters on a game’s character page in groups. By default there was a maximum of 10 groups, which wasn’t enough for all games. Another problem was that the order of groups could not be changed, which I’ve now solved by a nice easy drag and drop interface. Read more…

I’m currently working on changing the character groups in a game, if you don’t know what these are, look at the character list of any game on OngoingWorlds (for example this one). See how the characters are grouped together? Those are character groups.

Groups will be different for each game, which is why if you create a new scifi game you’ll get a different set of character groups than if you created a fantasy game, although you’ll be able to change these if they’re not suitable to whatever you want.

If you think these default character groups aren’t appropriate or you think they might need changing, now is actually a good chance to speak up and give me some suggestions. This won’t affect existing games, only ones that will be created from now on.